At The Rumpus, Richard Greenwald writes about the novels of Jonathan Lethem, urban gentrification, and the Sisyphean feat of achieving authenticity in New York.
Jonathan Lethem’s New York
A Library Themed Wedding
Know anyone getting married soon? Perhaps they’d like to integrate some books and bookshelves. (via @ShelfAwareness)
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Two Tickets to the Gun Show. Literally.
This Bright River author Patrick Somerville visited the Lakemoor Gun Show with our own Emily St. John Mandel, and then wrote about the experience for GQ.
Overlooked Books of the Decade
The Daily Beast offers up a list of “the most overlooked reads of the past 10 years – none of which involve a wizard, a vampire, or a code” from John McGahern’s By the Lake to Pandora in the Congo by Albert Sanchez Pinol.
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Finding Waldo
He’s the world’s most wanted fugitive, yet somehow the man wearing the red-striped shirt and nerd glasses escaped us until now. Yes, we’re talking about Where’s Waldo? At Slate, Ben Blatt found Waldo’s pattern, so you can spot him every time and impress your relatives this holiday season.
The Hip House Guest
Recommended Reading: Tyler Stoddard Smith’s essay on when Allen Ginsberg stayed with his family. “The following night, after Ginsberg’s poetry reading (why would I want to go to that?) a group of students eager for him to impart morsels of omniscience were forced to wait outside my room while we played video games on my Atari 2600—I destroyed Ginsberg at Frogger, but he eviscerated me on Combat.”
Tuesday New Release Day: d’Ambrosio; Erpenbeck; Pericoli; Dueñas; Boland; Brecht; Munro
New this week: Loitering by Charles d’Ambrosio; The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck; Windows on the World, a collection of Paris Review essays illustrated by Matteo Pericoli (Karl Ove Knausgaard’s contribution is excerpted here); The Heart Has Its Reasons by María Dueñas; A Woman Without a Country by Eavan Boland; Love Poems by Bertolt Brecht; and Family Furnishings, a new selection of short stories by Nobel laureate Alice Munro. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-half 2014 Book Preview.
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A New Award for the Promotion of Irish Literature
A new laureateship award worth €150,000 was created by Ireland’s Arts Council in conjunction with University College Dublin and New York University. The award will be given to “an outstanding Irish writer of fiction” with hopes that the author will “promote [Irish] literature around the world” and “inspire the public to engage with the best Irish fiction.” The first appointment will be made in 2014.
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